This is the oldest evidence of people starting fires

We didn't start the fire. (Neanderthals did, at least 400,000 years ago.)

See full article...

 

[Chuckstar]

There’s a book called Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human that makes a strong case that later Homo species could only have evolved after fire was being regularly used as a tool. Perhaps even that the brain expansion from Australopithecus to Homo required fire to already be in use.

The fundamental argument for a deep use of fire is that the lineage could not have evolved both a shorter, less efficient digestive system compared to our great ape relatives while it also evolved a much larger brain that is extremely energy hungry, unless they had developed some process to improve food digestibility. One absorbs meaningfully more calories from cooked food than from the same food raw. So much so that it’s non-trivial for humans to stay healthy on a raw-food-only diet. And across anthropology, we know of no culture that relies on a raw food diet (besides the occasional ascetic sub-culture). Even Eskimos cook their food more than conventional wisdom claims. The trick cultural evolution arrived at for the Eskimos was that they cook the high calorie parts, which allows forr better calorie absorption, and they don’t cook (or only lightly cook) the organs that contain temperature sensitive vitamins.

There is some likelihood that the early steps along the road to food processing involved pounding with rocks, which also improves calorie uptake, but it takes a lot of pounding to get the same effect as cooking.

To be clear, there’s a lot of evidence cited in that book about human physiology, how calories are absorbed from cooked food, the importance of cooking to human cultures broadly, etc. But I’m not claiming it to be the definitive word on the subject. I do think there is a strong argument to bE made that fire predated Neanderthals in Europe 400,000 years ago.

 

[Chuckstar]

First, very cool article!



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firekeeper

Fire watchers were a very important task in older societies. So much that it took a religious stance on at some points. But at this time, very much so routine life task.

Depends heavily on the environment. In dry environments where nice size sticks tend to be available (such as in the ponderosa forests of the U.S. Southwest), almost any day of the year you could find suitably dry/sized sticks and start a fire within about twenty minutes. In the rainy season in a rain forest, on the other hand… And most environments end up in between somewhere.

 

[Chuckstar]

We have evidence of people using but not casting fire? That's mad.

At Koobi Fora we find evidence of fire associated with H. erectus artifacts, including bone fragments and knapping fragments. We see both evidence of the effect of fire on the surface soil (what would have been surface soil at the time, that is) as well as evidence of fire damage to artifacts. The evidence could be consistent H. erectus artifacts getting burned in a wildfire (or multiple wildfires), though.

In Swartkrans, there is a cave with layers of ash and burned bone also dating to approximately H. erectus (or perhaps an Australopithecene). Analysis of the bones show burning consistent with the temperatures in campfires. We cannot say for certain that there exists no non-hominid-related natural process which would leave that kind of layered, burned bone in a cave, but it seems kind of unlikely.

We would generally expect to find evidence of hominid use of fire older than evidence that hominids actually were able to start the fire, if for no other reason than just the odds of survival of the fire-starting evidence is much lower than the odds of survival of the fire evidence. You can start a fire with a couple sticks, and then leave some relatively permanent fire-modified minerals in the soil (permanent as long as the soil isn't washed away) while the sticks could have even been used in the fire itself and not survived the night.

 

[Chuckstar]

View attachment 123949
I understood that reference.

As an example of how similar we might actually be to Neanderthals, I’d be willing to bet that a Neanderthal would seem much more human than the CGI characters in that movie do.

 

[Chuckstar]

While we don’t know when and where the first fire-starter lived, I’d be curious if there’s archaeological evidence for the ability to preserve fire? It seems reasonable that somewhere along the line from chance encounters with wildfires to creating it anytime with a spark, it would have occurred to someone(s) that the hot coals from a campfire could be kept, and perhaps even carried in some way.

Ötzi was carrying such a thing, but that was preserved in ice only about 5,200 years ago and is just a little newer than the oldest leather object ever found — a shoe dated to 5,500 years ago.

We’re very unlikely to ever find a leather/hide pouch from early enough for it to tell us anything about early human/hominin use of fire, considering that it would have to be hundreds of thousands of years ago, not merely thousands.

 

[Chuckstar]

It struck me reading the article - and this is nothing more than pure amateur speculation, so you're getting what you paid for it - that fire-starting probably came about in relation to the process of creating stone tools. It's not like we magically "knew" flint was the way to go. There had to be some experimentation, even after the "industry" had settled on flint. So there was probably a body of knowledge that "hitting that shiny stone makes pretty sparks." It just took someone, either by thought or by accident, to realize that those sparks could ignite dry grass or leaves. Once you have that leap, the natural human tendency towards, "Do it again! That was cool! Do it again!" (or however that translates into Neanderthal or earlier hominin) takes over, and soon everyone's doing it.

EDIT: From the several ninja's ahead of me, it would seem I'm not alone in this thinking.

I think we have to differentiate “fire starting” from “fire starting using flint”. It’s entirely possible humans were using friction to start fires, before using flint. But it certainly makes for a highly plausible explanation for how starting a fire using flint might have been discovered.

 

[Chuckstar]

Wheels were a good trick.
But the stick! A great invention!
And string, now we're really getting somewhere.
The wheel thing, just a passing fad.

Ummmm… the stick didn’t have to be invented. There are so many around it’s like they grow on trees or something.